Creating my first NFT for charity
Radioactive Hybrid Shark Frenzy — can cartoon sharks help save our ecosystem
Full disclosure, I had (have?) no idea what I’m doing. In real life I work as a User Experience Designer, and these days I mostly design enterprise web applications and the occasional mobile application, but I’m not a coder by any stretch. I know enough to know when a developer is trying to gaslight me into making their life a little easier at the expense of our eventual users, but can I build it myself? Can I fuck (not a question, just a statement meaning NO!).
I’ve been following crypto for several years as I find the whole thing fascinating, there’s some amazing innovation that will eventually, hopefully, lead to real social change along with all the technological innovation. But I’ve never really engaged with the various communities, as between the hype and the reality there’s a whole lot of garbage floating around (just like our oceans).
Over the last year hype around NFT’s has been massive, from little kids creating weird whales , to social engineering scammers getting into something a lot easier and possibly safer than consumer banking fraud.
It has been hard not to get caught up in the excitement, so after several months of doing nothing around it I thought I’d explore if I can create a NFT and generate some good with it. So this is an introduction to my learning journey, the resources I found useful, the tools I’ve used, and I’ll link out to the various elements I have created along the way to support this project.
This may take more than one article, as this was a snap decision 10 minutes ago. Like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing.
Cartoon Pigs!….maybe not.
I started out looking at collections on OpenSea, because of course I did. I’d already decided that I wanted to focus on a collection of programmatically generated images based on….nothing at all, and I wanted to see what was out there and popular. I was aware of cryptopunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and various other similar entities, so I started searching for animals that were not represented. At that time I could find very little in the way of pigs, and I’d read an interesting article called “Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima’s exclusion zone” that I thought could form the basis of some fun illustrations, as well as providing a great name for the project.
Someone had the url I wanted already, so that was my first change. A long, long, time ago, in my early teens I had a friend with a band (he knew someone else with a guitar) that he was going to call Radioactive Mud Hippos. There were not many hippo NFT’s, a url was available…and it turns out there’s an horrendous slang term associated with this that I won’t link to because misogyny and racism.
I’m sure at this point you are all impressed with the amount of due diligence going on here, certainly more than some of these companies. But now I needed to change the name again and scrap the illustrations I’d started.
Market research (I talked to my kids). They were not that keen on pigs and hippos anyway, but sharks, sharks are cool. From Baby Shark to Jaws, there’s something for all the age groups. And I’d just seen The Suicide Squad and it was easy to picture what a shark might look like if it was upright.
According to the Shark Trust, diverse shark populations are important for healthy oceans, the economy, and biodiversity. They are threatened by overfishing, and ecological sustainability was something that I thought should be a focus for the project, so I munged the names together and came up with the Radioactive Hybrid Shark Frenzy (see what I did there….a frenzy is a collection of sharks. No? Suit yourself).
Armed with a name I started drawing:
- Concepts — I’m using a Microsoft Surface so Procreate wouldn’t be an option anyway, however I’d recommend Concepts on iOS too. Concepts might not have the extensive brush palette that Procreate has, but it wins out in 2 key areas, it uses vectors which means I don’t need to be concerned about the image size as I can scale infinitely, and it is really, ridiculously easy to edit or change things waaaaaay after you’ve moved on from any aspect of your drawing. It has a free option, but I paid £5 to give me slightly better brush options. Their payment model is great as it isn’t all or nothing, there are steps in between for all budgets.
- Figma — This is a tool most commonly used by designers of web and mobile applications. It is browser based, with native applications for the most popular platforms, and is free for an individual account with some very minor limitations. Rather than just use layers in Concepts I used Figma to define a frame size for my drawing, and to create variants of each layer I’d exported from Concepts. This allowed me to easily see and generate examples of what the final composition would look like within strict limitations that I’d set.
Figma is also vector based and makes it easy to export to multiple formats (png, svg, jpg for example), and to scale exports across various sizes with virtually no effort. It also allows you to arrange your exports in folders based on your layer naming, so if you are lazy, but put a bit of forethought into what you are doing, you can save yourself loads of time later. I’m a fan.
There are many ways to achieve this using other applications, but I found this quick and convenient. You could get the same essential output from Photoshop, Krita, or countless other applications, all with their own workflows and caveats. But I didn’t use them for this. Onwards!
Why build an image like this I don’t hear you ask? I’ve assumed it is obvious, but maybe it isn’t. After I settled on a shark illustration I liked (that the middle child liked, she’s a born critic) I split the drawing into the layers that made the final image:
- Background colour
- Wallpaper
- Clothes
- Head and body
- Skin markings
- Nostrils
- Mouth
- Eyes
- Eyewear
- Fin accessory
This not only serves generating many possible image combinations, but will also allow generating metadata which we will use later in the creation of our NFT assets.
Programmatically generating 8000 images. I obviously looked for a shortcut. I spent about 5 mins reading and working through a Python tutorial (a whole day) and thought, I bet someone has a working example of something like this already on GitHub.
5 more minutes later (another day) and I’d found an old public repo from the Boring Bananas Company on GitHub. I had a look into this team and it turns out the kid that made Weird Whales had a bit of help from them, and they’d been running tutorials and all sorts for their community. Fantastic.
I subsequently found several other examples of the same type of thing, including the image generator in the public repo of Mr Weird Whales himself.
I’m making this sound like it took me a lunch break, realistically we’re a full working week of reading and drawing into this, and we’ve generated nothing so far. And as we have a full time job, a full working week of extra work is a lot of evenings and weekends.
There are some errors in the Boring Bananas generator script, and elements I was not going to need. The Weird Whales generator script is a little more simplistic, it is easier to see what each section of the Python script is doing, and the approach to the exported metadata is clean and easy to manage with IPFS plus a pinning service like Pinata. We’ll come back to that in another article, but kudos to this wee dude, he’s clearly going to go places.
I’ll talk about the contract in a follow up article as work on that was happening in parallel, and was partially there at the point we created socials accounts. Then we looked at ETH fees and had a bit of a rethink. What's the point of setting an affordable price to mint a NFT is the fees are way in excess of the NFT cost?
